Video games are commonly loaded into a random access memory (RAM) before a player may begin playing the game. This loading process may take a substantial amount of time. Instead of showing a blank screen to the game player, games are often designed with a loading screen. Loading screens may be a picture or a video related to the game, or even a progress bar. However, these loading screens are often not desirable. Preferably, once a game is selected, the game should be immediately playable. The effects of loading time are compounded further when games are being emulated and being delivered over a cloud based network. The delivery over the network may create an additional wait time. Also, network delays may cause the delivery of the emulated data to a game player's device to be slowed as well.
Further still, games are designed to be loaded from a predetermined starting position. Incremental buffering may be used in order to make the game load faster from this predetermined starting position. Incremental buffering is a technique that may be used to allow a game to load faster. Instead of having to build a large buffer from the beginning of the game, the buffer is initially small and then grows in size as the gameplay progresses. However, when a game is loaded at a location where the incremental buffering was not incorporated into the design of the game, the loading time may take even longer because a larger buffer must first be built at this position of the game. With the growth in popularity of mini-games, the ability to load a game quickly from any point in the game is highly desirable. In order to implement faster loading through incremental buffering, a game designer would be required to re-code parts of the game. This additional step would increase the time and cost required for developing mini-games.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for pre-loading translated code in a cloud based emulation. It is within this context that aspects of the present disclosure arise.